The Story of Valentine and His BrotherOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
The Story of Valentine and His Brother
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Brothers -- Fiction
She was a tall young woman, with a fine, elastic, well-developed figure,
looking about thirty, but not so old. Her features were very fine and
regular: her great, restless, unquiet, dark eyes flashed out of deep
caverns, which seemed to have been hollowed out by pain or passion
rather than by time. Any delicacy of complexion or youthful bloom which
she had ever possessed must have been long gone, for her skin was burned
to one uniform tint of reddish brown--the colour of exposure, of health
and vigour, but of that vigour and health which are purchased by all the
severities of an outdoor life. No one could see her once without looking
again, without wondering over so much beauty accompanied by so little
attractiveness. She had vagrant written in every line of her fine form
and miserable dress; but notwithstanding there was that in her abstract
look, always busy with something else than the thing immediately before
her--in a certain careless calm of manner, and indifference to all
surrounding her, which, I think, would have made the most abandoned of
men hesitate ere he offered any rudeness to this strange vagrant. She
had a wedding-ring on her finger--that was no great matter, for it is
easy to show to the world that ensign of respectability; but there was
something more trustworthy in her look and presence, the passionless
abstraction of her air. In her rough dress, with her outdoor look, her
hard hands, her strange beauty scarcely on the wane, she was protected
from every shadow of insult by the stony purity of her looks. Such a
woman might be miserable enough, but wanton never.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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